Fabrizio Costantini for The New York TimesKatricia Gray, left, of Detroit, brought sculptures to Tulani Salahu-Din, a researcher for the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture, at a November event to appraise possible donations to its collection. Go to related article »

How can we teach African-American history through the everyday voices of ordinary people and not just iconic leaders? How does history have a way of cropping up where you least expect it: at the bottom of a forgotten old storage box, under the dirt of Central Park or in the memories of a long-running TV dance show?

In recognition of Black History Month, we offer a different take on the significant events and eras of the African-American experience. We invite students and teachers to explore the interplay between extraordinary events and ordinary people.

In this post, we first offer general activities for considering how the stories of African-American history are told, as well as ideas for contributing to the telling yourself. Next, we have suggested a handful of examples of news articles and other resources about ordinary people witnessing, or reacting to, extraordinary events.

Please tell us what you’ll do this year to celebrate Black History Month.

Suggested Activities

1. Find New Heroes. Use the resources below as well as the oral history sites at StoryCorps Griot and the National Visionary Leadership Project to browse for interesting stories or use keyword searches to find sources on particular topics or eras — whether something general, like blues music, or something more specific, like the 1968 Memphis sanitary workers’ strike.

Ask each student to pick a source whom they have never heard of and make a presentation nominating that person for inclusion to a class museum of Unsung Heroes of Black History. How would they tell their selected hero’s story? What images and multimedia would they use? What artifacts would they want to include?

2. Interview the Heroes Among You: Using sources like Storycorps as a model, find people in your own family or community who can add to the story of African-American history in some way.

You might choose an era or an issue that we’ve highlighted in this post or that you’ve read about in our Black History Month collection of archival Times articles and create questions related specifically to it, or you might just invite this person to tell the story of his or her life. Record it on audio or video, then consider inviting a panel of interesting people from your community to your school to speak and take questions.

3. Listen to the Voices in the Crowd: How can the impressions of ordinary people shape our understanding of historic events and offer something beyond the official version you might have read in a textbook? Ask students to find and read stories and interviews with people who lived through or witnessed extraordinary events and note how their perspective adds to or differs from the way a textbook or news article has presented the information. (Students might use our Multiple Point of View graphic organizer to record various voices on one topic.)

For example, how did people of different ages and backgrounds react to the election of the first African-American president?

4. Redefine “Black History”: What belongs under the heading “black history”? Does it include sports, entertainment and business? Does it include people with no claim to fame whatsoever? What is missing?

Discuss the attributes of “history” as a field, including popular and oral history. Then ask students to look through the stories below, explore thearchives of The Times or follow continuing coverage, looking for unusual stories that fill in our knowledge of the African-American experience. Students can compile a collection of “new history” sources and explain how each contributes to our understanding of African-American history.

5. Look for Echoes: What issues that we first wrestled with as a nation in long-ago African-American history continue to echo today? How have they morphed into a 21st century version of the same idea, question or conflict? How can you trace their evolution? What solutions have been offered along the way? How did they, and do they, affect ordinary people? Students might create timelines, collages or multi-genre research papers that trace one issue through history, perhaps even providing predictions of how it will continue to morph in years to come.

Resource Examples: Everyday Voices Making History

Randy Harris for The New York TimesKathe Hambrick-Jackson, of the River Road African American Museum in Louisiana, raises foods that would have been familiar to slaves, like okra and pears. Go to related article »

Below, we have selected only a few of the potentially thousands of articles and resources that tell the story of everyday people during the time periods featured. We hope that teachers and students will use resources like The Times archives, or StoryCorps Griot and the National Visionary Leadership Project to find more.

As you read, you might consider the following:

• Why do some voices become part of the historical narrative, while others don’t?
• How does the voice (or voices) featured in this article deepen our understanding of a historical event or time period?
• How do ordinary people change history?

Emancipation and Jim Crow

• Even 150 years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, new photographs and scholarship are adding to our understanding of what freedom looked like for millions of black Americans. “We consciously looked for black photographers,” said Deborah Willis, co-author of the book “Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery.” “We consciously looked for images of women, whose stories have often not been included.”

• Many African-Americans cultivated “Juneteenth gardens” in order to survive. Luckily, historical gardeners have preserved generations of heirloom seeds in order to protect an agricultural legacy that stretches from cowpeas to fish peppers.

• In 1942 thousands of black soldiers helped build the Alaska Canada Military Highway. Besides the fact that they faced “vicious cold, heat, mosquitoes and mud,” just like the other soldiers, they also had to deal with the racism of a segregated Army. Many historians cite the contribution of black soldiers to the 1,250-mile-long highway as helping to lead to the Army’s desegregation six years later.

The Civil Rights Era

• For many, the years in which African-Americans and their supporters fought for legal freedom and equality bring a flood of well-known images — sit-ins, marches and brave schoolchildren facing hostile crowds.

But recently discovered photographs taken by Gordon Parks show a different side of that struggle. They are all in color, and they portray the daily efforts of a single extended family in Alabama as they navigate the treacherous currents of the civil rights struggle in 1956. By narrowing his focus, critics say Parks offered a unique view into one family’s passage through history.

• The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 ended bus segregation in that city and helped lead to an end of segregation on buses across the country. The stories of Rosa Parks and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are frequently taught in history classes, but who else was responsible for the boycott’s great success? What role did ordinary people play in the boycott? The Historical Thinking Matters Web site provides a Document Based Question that lets students explore this very question.

• Another story related to the bus boycott is the story of Claudette Colvin, the 15 year old girl who was arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman, nine months before Rosa Parks made history. Ms. Colvin’s story was once a forgotten footnote in history, but now she has acquired some recognition — especially because she is the subject of the book, “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice”, a National Book Award winner for Young People’s Literature.

• The history of the civil rights movement, as measured in landmark legislation to extend and protect African-American rights in the 1950s and ‘60s, is far from settled.

Courts are still weighing challenges to the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action laws. Researchers see uneven progress in achieving the equal opportunity goals of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Police departments continue to debate the legality of stop-and-frisk policies aimed at reducing urban crime. And civil rights organizations are suing New York City over public school admission standards that they say discriminate against black and Hispanic children.

Recent History

• Times are changing for organizations that once made headlines for barring African-Americans. These days black people are joining the Daughters of the American Revolution, which permits only members with an ancestor who fought against the British.

• In other places, the work goes on. Dr. Aaron Shirley, once lauded as a civil rights pioneer and the only black pediatrician in Mississippi, is still fighting to provide adequate health care for rural residents there. Activists continue to search for measures to improve urban life in Roseland, a blighted Chicago neighborhood where President Obama worked as a community organizer as a young man. And struggling black residents of New York City are relocating to the South in order to find more economic opportunity, in a reversal of the Great Migration that brought many of their ancestors to the region a century before.

• And Lonnie G. Bunch III continues to build his museum. Mr. Bunch, the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, is racing to finish construction of its permanent building on the National Mall in Washington. Since his appointment in 2005 after an act of Congress, his staff at the Smithsonian Institution has been struggling to figure out which stories to tell about black history. Mr. Bunch says the museum will use African-American culture to teach all Americans about their country. “If my ancestors are smiling,” he said, “then I know we’ve done a good job.”

Common Core ELA Anchor Standards, 6-12

Reading
1. Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
8. Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.
9. Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.
10. Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently.

Writing
1. Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.
2. Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization and analysis of content.
4. Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization and style are appropriate to task, purpose and audience.
8. Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism.